Trump’s AI Policy Circle: A Ten-Sided Tug-of-War

With China’s open-weight AI models rising, the Trump administration relies on a tangle of officials across the White House, Commerce, Treasury and other agencies to shape AI policy, producing a fragmented, ten-sided power dynamic rather than centralized control. Key players—Howard Lutnick, Arvind Raman, Sean Cairncross, David Sacks, Susie Wiles, and Scott Bessent—advocate divergent approaches from export controls and hardline actions against Chinese labs to a more permissive stance and faster development of Western open-weight models, as the administration seeks to keep the U.S. ahead in AI.